Rafe Mendez, 61, has restored antique typewriters out of his converted Grand Haven, Michigan, garage for 29 years, and he hasn’t set foot at the city’s annual summer street fair since his wife Elaine died four years prior. He only agreed this year because his 22-year-old granddaughter Lila, who sells hand-typed poetry at local markets, begged him to bring a display of vintage models, said she couldn’t lift the 30-pound iron machines on her own. His biggest flaw, one he’d never admit out loud, is that he’s spent every day since Elaine’s funeral convincing himself any spark of attraction to another woman is a betrayal of their 36-year marriage, so he’s avoided every social event that isn’t a family dinner or a trip to the hardware store.
The July air smells like fried Oreos, cut grass, and the faint briny tang of Lake Michigan three blocks away. A cover band at the end of the street slurs through a 90s country hit, the bass thumping low enough to rattle the keys of the 1947 Underwood perched on his folding table. He’s halfway through explaining to a wide-eyed 12-year-old why typewriters don’t need wifi when the scent of jasmine mixed with cotton candy cuts through the fried food stench, sharp and sweet.
He looks up. Clara Hale is leaning on the edge of his table, so close the frayed cuff of her linen button-down brushes the top of his scuffed work boot. 58, owner of the used bookstore two blocks over, she was his junior year chemistry lab partner, the girl he’d had a stupid, giddy crush on that never went anywhere before she moved to Chicago after graduation. She moved back two years ago after her divorce, and he’d avoided running into her on purpose, knew one look at the silver streak running through her dark auburn ponytail would yank up feelings he’d buried decades prior.
“I left three broken Royal portables on your porch last winter,” she says, grinning, and he laughs out loud—he’d fixed those, sold two, kept one for Lila, always wondered who’d dropped them off with a scribbled note that didn’t have a name. When he reaches across the table to grab that exact Royal to show her, their knuckles brush. He feels the rough callus on her index finger, worn in from turning thousands of book pages over the years, and she doesn’t yank her hand away, just holds it there for half a beat, her skin warm even through the faint sheen of sweat from the 82-degree heat.
He tenses first, yanking his hand back like he’s touched a hot soldering iron, a hot flush creeping up his neck. The voice in his head screams that he’s being unfaithful, that Elaine loved this fair, used to drag him to every booth for kettle corn and bad cover sets, that he should pack up and go home right now. But she leans in closer, her shoulder almost touching his, ignoring the text buzzing in her back pocket, asking how he unsticks frozen shift keys, what the rarest typewriter he’s ever restored is.
He finds himself talking for 45 minutes straight, telling her about the 1915 Corona he found in a barn upstate, the time a guy brought in a typewriter struck by lightning with every key fused together. She laughs at his dumb jokes, the sound brighter than the band’s tinny vocals, and when a kid sprinting past with a foot-tall cotton candy stick almost slams into her, she grabs his bicep to steady herself, her fingers pressing into the muscle under his worn flannel. He doesn’t flinch.
The sun dips below the downtown storefronts, painting the sky streaky pink and tangerine, and vendors start folding up their booths around him. Lila swings by, says she’s heading to a bonfire with her friends, can he pack up alone? She grins so wide her dimples show when she spots Clara, winking at him over her shoulder before she jogs off. Clara helps him fold the table, carry the heavy typewriters to the bed of his beat-up pickup, and when they’re done, she leans against the tailgate, her scuffed white converse tapping his work boot, and asks if he wants to get a beer at The Rusty Anchor down the street, says the hot wings are still as good as they were when they snuck in with fake IDs senior year.
He hesitates for three full seconds, the voice in his head still screaming, but then he looks at her, the streetlight catching the silver in her hair, her bottom lip pulled between her teeth like she’s scared he’ll say no, and he nods. They walk down the sidewalk side by side, their hands brushing twice when they step over cracks in the concrete, and the third time she laces her fingers through his, her page-turner callus rubbing against the callus on his thumb from decades of prying open typewriter casings. His chest feels tight, but it’s not the heavy, grieving tightness he’s carried for four years—it’s the light, fluttery tightness he felt when he first asked Elaine out, when Lila was born, when he finished restoring his first rare typewriter.
They slide into a sticky vinyl booth in the back of the bar, the jukebox thrumming Johnny Cash deep enough to vibrate the table. The bartender, a kid named Javi who went to high school with Lila, winks when he sets down her draft IPA and his usual old fashioned, saying he’ll leave them be. She leans across the booth, her knee brushing his under the table, and says she’s been wanting to ask him out for 10 months, ever since she saw him at the grocery store buying Elaine’s favorite peach pie for her birthday, and she didn’t say anything then because she didn’t want to intrude. He smiles, takes a slow sip of his old fashioned, the bourbon warm going down his throat, and taps the side of her beer glass twice with his index finger before he says he’s glad she finally worked up the nerve.
